James Agee: Journalist, Critic, Novelist, Screenwriter

Not every photograph ever snapped of James Agee caught him between pulls on a bottle or puffs on a cigarette. It only seems that way because the journalist/critic/novelist/screenwriter drank and smoked himself to death at 45, in 1955, at a time when postwar American culture conflated art with martyrdom and manhood with excess. Think of the poets lost to lithium, loony bins and suicide, the jazz musicians strung up and out on heroin, the abstract expressionists who slashed and burned themselves. Delmore Schwartz, Charlie Parker and Jackson Pollock pointed the way for Jack Kerouac, James Dean, Truman Capote, John Berryman, Elvis, Janis and Jimi. Like the Greek warrior Philoctetes, hadn't they been allowed to play so brilliantly with their bows and arrows because they suffered suppurating wounds? So the iconic image, emblematic and self-destructive, was the Shadow Man - a Humphrey Bogart, a J. D. Salinger, an Edward R. Murrow, maybe even an Albert Camus. Agee, with his cold blue eyes, his thick dark hair and his handsome hillbilly Huguenot hatchet face, belonged on this wall of tragic-hero masks, at least till he inflated like a frog, from drinking alone in a Hollywood bungalow, and got kicked out of the 20th Century Fox studio commissary because he smelled so bad from never taking a bath.

We would prefer to think of him as some kind of Bodhisattva wannabe, looking for God in all the wrong places. But from his autobiographical fiction, "The Morning Watch" and "A Death in the Family," and from biographies by Geneviève Moreau in 1977 and Laurence Bergreen in 1984, it's obvious that Agee had, ah, anger issues. You would, too, if your nurturing father got himself killed in a one-man car crash when you were only 6 years old, leaving you with an Anglo-Catholic true believer of a mother who not only made you quit Knoxville, Tenn., for a parochial school in the Cumberland sticks, but also came after you with circumcision scissors. Never mind that at St. Andrew's you fell under the protective wing of Father Flye. To make up for having been unable to raise your fists in self-defense when your dad tried to teach you to box, you would now do a lot of damage to small animals.

After which, Exeter, about whose princely privilege Agee complained, but not enough to keep the "outsider" and "lone wolf" from playing piano, writing poems, acting in plays, going to movies, singing in glee club, editing the literary magazine, running the literary society, winning scholarships and drinking gin, not to mention his unrequited crush on another boy and his very requited affair with a girl librarian. It will be more of the same at Harvard, where the Artist as an Ultraserious Young Man polishes the pointy shoes of I. A. Richards, reads Dostoyevsky on wallowing and rapture, writes for The Crimson before becoming president of The Advocate, and wins scholarships and poetry prizes, while his Hillbilly Slob persona chain-smokes Chesterfields until the nicotine stains his fingers orange, arranges for bootleggers to deliver late at night to his dorm, drives a fist through the window of a streetcar that proposes to depart without him, and is arrested for public drunkenness, beaten bloody and tossed in jail.

And then there's the God-Fearing Altar Boy Agee, who comes back from his carousing just in time for early Mass. This is the one he seems to leave behind when he graduates from Harvard to New York, where Dwight Macdonald, with whom he has been corresponding about films since he was at Exeter and Macdonald at Yale, wangles him a writing job at Fortune magazine. Hart Crane hadn't worked out at Fortune but Archibald MacLeish is still going strong. Kindly MacLeish arranges for a book of Agee's to be published in the Yale Younger Poets series while the poet, who can only work at night in the empty Time Inc. offices on the 50th floor of the Chrysler Building with bourbon burning holes in him and Beethoven blasting his eardrums, reads Proust and writes articles on butlers, quinine, orchids and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

He thought he was only on loan to Henry Luce until he could support himself as a serious writer. But his relationship with Time Inc. lasted more than 15 years, longer than any other in his life except those with his sticky mother and Father Flye - longer, certainly, than his marriage to Via, the daughter of WASP academics, for bourgeois respectability; or his marriage to Alma, the humble Jewish concert musician, for hot sex; or his marriage to Mia, an Austrian Catholic émigré, for forgiving friendship. And much longer than his not-quite-six years at The Nation, for $25 a twice-monthly column plus cult status, where W. H. Auden read him so as to avoid having to go to any movies, followed by the bibulous sabbaticals in Southern California with John Huston and Dorothy Parker, where, because of liver damage, he hallucinated before he went to bed at night and vomited when he got up in the morning.

Time Inc., in fact, was his principal enabler, holding him up so that he could pass out and come to all over again. No sooner had he quit Fortune in 1939 because they stopped publishing his articles - including his "Summa theologiae" on Alabama sharecropping, with Walker Evans photographs - than he signed on next door to review six books a week for Time, to which, Bergreen tells us, he reported in the late afternoon, unshaven, disheveled, in a sweat-stained workshirt, where a typewriter waited with a bottle beside it. (Not to mention Whittaker Chambers, his equally odd officemate, who also liked to work alone at night, but this was before Alger Hiss had looked into his teeth.) After which he returned to Greenwich Village and, according to an indignant Bergreen, if Alma happened to be threatening to leave him because of Mia, he'd drag her back up the stairs by the hair on her head. For some reason the chronology in this two-volume Library of America celebration chooses not to mention that Walker Evans slept with at least two of Agee's wives, both times with Agee's encouragement, and once with Agee watching.

Later, when Agee switched from books to movies, the music critic Winthrop Sargeant remembers his drinking whiskey until he couldn't focus, then sobering up with benzedrine, then giving the bottle another suck. Maybe this was because Time chopped his copy down to single paragraphs and stuck in such neologisms as "cinemaddict," "Technicoloration" and "Tarzantics." On the other hand, maybe they sought to punish him for using words like "corybantic" and "prolapsed." At The Nation, where he was almost immediately invited to ruminate on the same films at greater length, with his shoes off, he developed an amazing informality of style altogether unlike anything in the D. H. Lawrentian clotted-cream baroque of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" - a passionate chattiness, sly humor and demotic register, forever wary of what he called "rigor artis," that has characterized the best movie criticism ever since. Agee the "social anarchist" may have been the most muddled political mind ever to work for a radical weekly - not to be read on the subject of race without a wince - but he knew how to talk to people who hadn't gone to Harvard.

From the Library of America, with almost 1,600 pages to wade around in, one might have hoped for a glimpse of the "Scientists and Tramp" treatment he wrote for Charlie Chaplin, about a utopian barter community after an atom-bomb attack. Or the satirical "Dedication Day," published in Macdonald's magazine, Politics, in which well-behaved citizens of the future are fed Time, Reader's Digest and the New Testament in oral, rectal and intravenous liquid form. Or his essays for New Masses on art for art's sake and The Partisan Review on religion, his television scripts for the "Omnibus" Abe Lincoln series, and his screenplays on Gauguin and Genghis Khan. Besides which, aren't we entitled to some editorial word on whether the 94-page "Night of the Hunter" screenplay printed here is the same one published in "Agee on Film: Five Film Scripts," which Bergreen suggests was really the director Charles Laughton's rewrite of Agee's hopeless 350-page original?

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No such luck. But what we do have is quite wonderful. If the two longer fictions are very much of the 1950's, full of existential terror and wild-child Freud, they bear first-rate witness nonetheless to what Salinger stopped writing about and Harold Brodkey maybe should have. Moreover, they were written for the screen in our heads, the Ingmar Bergman that Agee never got to see. If you've read them before, you will remember almost every scene - the priest, the butterfly and the checkered cap in "A Death in the Family"; the locust shell, the dead snake and the absent God in "The Morning Watch." Although many little boys who cry Tom Wolfe have called "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" the foundational text of the New Parajournalism, there is absolutely no reason to blame Agee for the great white safari jackets and yupscale anchor faces whose idea of reporting is all performance art, no fact-checking, all tease, no scruple, and not to be usefully distinguished from cool ads for heroin and bulimia. (He was a fact fetishist.) Nor should he be held accountable for a new, self-conscious anthropology so afraid it might Heisenberg innocent tribes all over the rain forest just by observing their kinks that it leaves them to starve in their stone age. (He was a bleeding heart.) Instead, think of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," with its Elizabethan colors, biblical echoes, high glaze, screened pentimento, 80-proof reveries, self-flagellations and excruciating doubts, as James Agee's "Moby-Dick." And like "Moby-Dick," it failed to sell a thousand copies before it was remaindered.

And then he took us to the movies: Pauline Kael once made gentle fun of Agee's favorite value-added words, from "bare and plain and true and honest" to "tender," "disciplined," "vigorous," "masculine" and "healthy." She might have mentioned "virile," "poetic," "humane" and "edged," as well as "vitality," "passion," "immediacy," "momentum" and (not in a good way) "genteelism." He also has a habit of second-thinking his way around to biting his own hand in midcaress: after two paragraphs of praise, for instance, he says: "Such matters aside, however, 'Dragon Seed' is an almost unimaginably bad movie." About "Ivan the Terrible": "Interesting as the film is, the longer I reflect on it the unhappier I feel about it." Or about "Hail the Conquering Hero": "Most certainly Sturges has fine comic and satiric gifts, and knows how to tell more truth than that when he thinks it expedient; but he seldom does."

He hates background music, thinks all movies should get out of the studio and into the countryside, with nonactors instead of stars, and admits to never having read "Jane Eyre," "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" or Chekhov's "Shooting Party." Besides Chaplin and the silent comedians, he chants praisesongs to Angela Lansbury, Groucho Marx, Margaret O'Brien and Keenan Wynn. Orson Welles . . . not so much. About Gilbert and Sullivan he's got some ulterior personal bone to pick. But Eugene O'Neill's "Mourning Becomes Electra" is "a play that hankers after greatness (and Greekness) like a schoolgirl with a crush on a bust of Aeschylus" and Arthur Miller's "All My Sons" is "Ibsen for beginners."

Not that he is any more to be trusted than the rest of us, going out of his way to bad-mouth "Casablanca" twice. But we never doubt his generosity and hopefulness, his decent respect for the hard work of others, or his justifiable fear for the future of the medium he loved. And then there is the amiable wit, his whimsies with language. "If 'Wilson' fails, Darryl Zanuck has promised never again to make a picture without Betty Grable." "Mary Martin, I notice with some alarm, is playing Jean Arthur - a tendency which even Miss Arthur must learn to curb." His imaginary MGM production of "The Brothers Karamazov" would star Fred Astaire as Alyosha K., with "a great dancing sequence called Alyosha's Dream" in which Marlene Dietrich plays Grushenka, the Virgin, Mary Magdalene and Father Zossima.

There should have been so much more that he never wrote. He didn't because he couldn't. From blackouts to coronary thrombosis is not one of the 12 steps. He ought to have paid more attention, if not to his worried doctors, then to his own review of "The Lost Weekend," which spoke of "the workings of the several minds inside a drinker's brain," "the narcissism and self-deceit which are so indispensable," "the self-loathing and self-pity which are so invariable" and "the sudden annihilating loneliness and fear of God."

About the poor in Appalachia and the dead in World War II, Agee told us that character wasn't destiny. Yet he was trapped in himself. S. J. Perelman once visited the odd household he maintained for a while in Hollywood with Dorothy Parker, "in a fog of crapulous laundry, stale cigarette smoke and dirty dishes, sans furniture or cleanliness; one suspects they wet their beds." At the bottom of the bottle, instead of God, was pickled brain - and delusions of grandeur and perfection. Grandiosity in Agee's case was a way to raise the stakes so high that failure at least looked valiant, and perfectionism was a place to hide when he couldn't deliver on a promise. Who knows what marriage was, maybe musical electric chairs. Add it all up, tossing in macho rubbish about tomcatting and romantic beeswax about the agony of artistic creation, and what you don't get is a grown-up. You get Rufus in Knoxville.

As the African Ellellou explained to us once and forever in John Updike's novel "The Coup": "I perceived that a man, in America, is a failed boy."

John Leonard is a contributing editor to Harper's, The Nation, and New York magazine.

Correction: Oct. 23, 2005, Sunday:

A review of the Library of America's two-volume collection of James Agee's writings on Sept. 25 overlooked an editorial note in one book. The review raised the question whether Agee's script for the film "Night of the Hunter" was the one published in "Agee on Film" (1958). The answer is yes, as the anthology editor explains in a Note on the Texts.